(no subject)
Tenth Doctor, Rose (a bit), Jack. I kind of scared myself writing this. Feedback very welcome. Rated PG at least for violence. If anyone can think of a better title, please tell me.
ONE
I heard
you scream.
Lying face to face with you on the metal floor of this rescue ship, I can still hear that sound echoing over the crash of the engines, the shouting of soldiers.
How we got here is a long story. It's one of the universe's oldest. Suffice it to say that Samarra Frantling Lyt's message reached me through the Venatic Fleet. They were hunting his ship, the Argus Panoptes, a science vessel he'd stolen from the last world he'd sucked dry.
The Argus had pursued a rather odd course - leading the Fleet a merry chase, but also seeking something. When he finally found it, he vanished, and then he sent his message.
All he wanted was me. The last possible enemy. The last of the watchmakers and the last of the ghouls, the last of the damned, the soul survivor of his grave-robbing species.
His message was your latest ship, a fast armed courier found drifting in the main shipping lane near Bellatrix, where no-one would miss it. On the side of the ship was painted what the Fleet at first took to be an elaborate artwork. I recognised the script, and the word it spelled out, the name of a star that had been dead for ten million years.
Only a Time Lord or a Vampire would recognise the name.
I hatched a plan with the help of the Fleet. The star had long been a dirty nebula, a mass of x-rays and static in which a ship could easily hide itself. I refitted your courier craft, added a few improvements of my own, and slipped quietly into the cloud.
I almost had to duct tape Rose to a wall to stop her from coming with me. There are things she should never have to face, things neither of us would have her witness.
The plan was simple and it would work. Otherwise I think she'd have duct taped me to a wall to stop me from going. I carried one of the Fleet's intelligence beacons into one of my pockets: as soon as I left the courier, it'd trigger, and rescue would come within minutes. I only needed to hold Lyt's attention for long enough.
I expected some terrible plan on his part, some elaborate scientific scheme. He had, after all, stolen a ship crewed by spider-like robots, the curious, passionless invention of the Bellatricians. The only thing left of their world, now.
His plan was simple. He knew the Fleet would catch up with him soon. He only wanted to kill me. He would be perfectly satisfied with only hurting me. Just one last blow struck against the ancient enemy.
He died grinning.
You look as though you've climbed down a spiral staircase inside your head, and you're never going to come upstairs again.
TWO
I heard
you scream.
I had to admit I had really got out of my depth on this mission. OK, it wasn't really a mission as such; someone else sends you on a mission. This was my own idea, my own fault. The cachet and the sheer riches it would mean to capture - or better still, kill from a safe distance - the universe's last Vampire, well, they'd gone to my head.
It was the most exciting thing I'd done since you and Rose left me on Satellite Five, Doctor.
I don't know how he disabled my ship. Superior technology, I guess, stolen from Bellatrix Four. There wasn't a living thing left on that world, not the millions of sentient beings who'd lived there, not an animal, not a plant, not even a germ. He'd squeezed that world until the pips squeaked and then he'd run, knowing he'd given himself away. Maybe he was tired of hiding.
His ship was full of robot spider-things the size of a man, covered in jointed tentacles. I was in my emergency spacesuit when they boarded, thank God, because they just tore open the canopy and pulled me out.
According to the chronometer sewn into the sleeve, it was three days later when I came round on the bridge of the Argus.
Lyt was six foot two with ice blonde hair to the middle of his back. He looked humanish, even human. I had expected maybe a Bela Lugosi cape, or at least something elaborate and Ming the Merciless, but he just wore an ordinary spacefarer's one-piece, like the one I had on under my pressure suit.
I guess if he had red eyes and fangs sticking out he wouldn't have been able to hide so long - for millions of years, millions. You could feel the weight of age coming off him.
'Where is he?'
'Where's who?'
He stepped in beside me and slid his palm down inside my shirt, as low as my navel. He laid his hand flat against my stomach. I was in three layers of spaceworthy clothing and I have never felt so naked in my life.
'I'll scar you, beautiful. I'll have those baby blues out and I'll have your tongue before I tear loose your viscera.'
'In need of some guts, are you?'
He took his hand away and faced me and whispered, 'Have you ever seen a man burned alive?'
'Can't say that I have.'
'Neither have I. Where is he?'
I spat in his face. I was out of clever lines.
'Let's find out.'
One of the science machines held onto me while the other one took a metal probe, like a flattened spoon, from Lyt's fingers. It floated up to me and started running the tip of the thing over my face. Across my forehead, pausing over my temples. It pushed it softly at one of my eyes, through the lid, then withdrew.
I laughed, I actually laughed, when it slid the thing into one of my nostrils. Then I realised it was looking for a place where the bone of my skull was thin enough.
'Switch on.'
Their probe had no effect on me at all. It hit the rest of the universe with unbelievable power. There had never been any stars, I remember that - they were all a huge conspiracy, huge lights trailed behind invisible spacecraft. Lyt's ship was trailing one of them, right now, and he had taken out my lungs and and replaced them with the battery needed to power the starlight. I remember I was absolutely terrified that he would put my lungs out of the airlock.
The thing was still in my nose when I found out I was lying on the floor. Every part of me was shaking like a flimsy house in an earthquake. I was roaring and shrieking like an opera singer being electrocuted. I was hyperventilating, the room was spinning, I couldn't draw breath.
Somehow, from somewhere, you were there. I knew it was you, I knew. I tried to crawl across the floor to you. Blood was gushing out of my nose. I remember trying to reach out, wanting to put my hand on your shoe, or grab the cuff of your trousers. I couldn't even do that.
I think I'd gone deaf. I couldn't understand what either of you were saying. I started to understand it was some sort of negotiation, some kind of contract, with me as the goods.
I think that was when I really lost it, started thrashing around on the floor. It was like trying to swim in a nightmare. One of the science machines sat down on me. Its tentacles curled round me like the bars of a cage.
I could still see. I think that was when I started to cry.
I saw one of the machines lash its silver limbs around you. Oh you were quick, twisting in their grip, slipping out of your coat, but you didn't really want to get away and in the end you let the thing pin you in place, holding you up.
Lyt loosened your tie, trying to do it slowly to make it worse for you, too hungry to wait. I saw the buttons pop off your shirt as he ripped into your neck. I couldn't see your face. I couldn't see his face. I could see blood running down behind his pale hair.
I saw you grabbing at his arms, trying to tear his hair, trying to kick him, twist away from him, pull free leaving your flesh in his teeth, anything to make it stop. The machine only tightened its grip.
I saw him laughing - I heard him laughing, as though my senses had come back all at once. I saw him throw his head back and yellow hair flowing down his back, flecked with blood.
I tried to look at the button that had rolled onto the floor in front of me instead.
I heard you scream.
It stopped.
I saw he was pushing his mouth into yours. I think there's something in their saliva. I saw you loosen in the machine grip, defeated by that bloody kiss. I saw your head lolling down, your tranquillised eyes.
I think I went deaf again, or blind. The next thing I knew I was here on this metal floor, staring into your face.
So the plan must have worked.
Hooray for our side.
THREE
Rose has decided it's about penetration.
The Doctor has told her as little about what happened as she would let him get away with. Actually, she didn't really want all the gruesome details. Just enough that she could understand, enough that she could really help.
Lyt, the Vampire - now killed very, very, guaranteed dead by the [something] Fleet - tortured Jack. Specifically he used some kind of probe, the Doctor says a neurological radar, whatever that means, to try and find out where the Doctor was. He didn't know the Doctor was already on his way to rescue Jack.
Lyt had forced his way into Jack's body - into his skull - and into his mind. It had hurt terribly. The Doctor said it would drive the strongest human being out of their mind, even if only temporarily. He had been penetrated, thought Rose, like a woman. Lyt had unmanned him.
That's why Captain Jack won't talk to her. She sat by his hospital bed for hours, but he wouldn't say a word. It's too humiliating. He needs to talk to another man.
She's not sure the Doctor actually qualifies.
She sits in a Fleet cabin, looking at herself in the mirror, pushing her hair around, sometimes flipping through a magazine she can't read. There is nothing she can do. This is their big reunion, and Jack is shattered and silent in a hospital bed, and the only thing she can do is stay away.
The door pings and opens. It's the Doctor. He looks pale and there's still something furious and cold in his eyes that makes her flinch. Then he smiles, as though putting all of that aside for her.
Rose can't help jumping up and throwing her arms around him, although she has to do it carefully to avoid hurting him. There are still dressings on his throat and the top of his chest. It makes her think Lyt was trying to eat the Doctor's hearts out.
'They're going to let me see Jack shortly,' he tells her.
Rose feels herself relax. The Doctor will know what to do, of course he will. He doesn't need to know all about male psychology, he doesn't need talk about penetration. He almost died himself from Lyt's bites and the poison in his mouth. He's been a prisoner, he's been hurt, he's been tortured so many times himself.
For a moment, she's so grateful she can't help. That makes her stomach tighten up so much that she thinks she might be sick.
'You'd better go, then,' she says, pulling out of the embrace and squeezing his hand. 'Make him better, Doctor.'
'I'll try.'
'Really try. Whatever it takes.'
'I'll do my best.'
FOUR
Penetration has nothing to do with it. What Rose knows about men is thirty centuries out of date.
The Doctor sits by Jack's bedside, thumbing through a Venatic magazine, patiently waiting.
At a glance, you can't tell there's anything wrong with the Captain. Lyt and his machines did very little damage on the outside. Even on the inside, he's looking good; the scans show his neurotransmitters are back to normal levels, there's no permanent neurological damage.
When he walked into the room the Doctor took in Jack's crumpled hair, his five o'clock shadow and his angry eyes that won't look at anything, still burning with shame.
'It was the helplessness,' says Jack, at length.
'Yes,' says the Doctor, not looking up from his magazine.
Ten minutes later Jack adds, 'Nice face.'
'Thank you.'
'Little asymmetrical, maybe.'
'All part of the charm.'
Jack sighs and runs both hands through his hair, pushing it into place. 'What does a fellow have to do to get a drink around here?' he says.
ONE
I heard
you scream.
Lying face to face with you on the metal floor of this rescue ship, I can still hear that sound echoing over the crash of the engines, the shouting of soldiers.
How we got here is a long story. It's one of the universe's oldest. Suffice it to say that Samarra Frantling Lyt's message reached me through the Venatic Fleet. They were hunting his ship, the Argus Panoptes, a science vessel he'd stolen from the last world he'd sucked dry.
The Argus had pursued a rather odd course - leading the Fleet a merry chase, but also seeking something. When he finally found it, he vanished, and then he sent his message.
All he wanted was me. The last possible enemy. The last of the watchmakers and the last of the ghouls, the last of the damned, the soul survivor of his grave-robbing species.
His message was your latest ship, a fast armed courier found drifting in the main shipping lane near Bellatrix, where no-one would miss it. On the side of the ship was painted what the Fleet at first took to be an elaborate artwork. I recognised the script, and the word it spelled out, the name of a star that had been dead for ten million years.
Only a Time Lord or a Vampire would recognise the name.
I hatched a plan with the help of the Fleet. The star had long been a dirty nebula, a mass of x-rays and static in which a ship could easily hide itself. I refitted your courier craft, added a few improvements of my own, and slipped quietly into the cloud.
I almost had to duct tape Rose to a wall to stop her from coming with me. There are things she should never have to face, things neither of us would have her witness.
The plan was simple and it would work. Otherwise I think she'd have duct taped me to a wall to stop me from going. I carried one of the Fleet's intelligence beacons into one of my pockets: as soon as I left the courier, it'd trigger, and rescue would come within minutes. I only needed to hold Lyt's attention for long enough.
I expected some terrible plan on his part, some elaborate scientific scheme. He had, after all, stolen a ship crewed by spider-like robots, the curious, passionless invention of the Bellatricians. The only thing left of their world, now.
His plan was simple. He knew the Fleet would catch up with him soon. He only wanted to kill me. He would be perfectly satisfied with only hurting me. Just one last blow struck against the ancient enemy.
He died grinning.
You look as though you've climbed down a spiral staircase inside your head, and you're never going to come upstairs again.
TWO
I heard
you scream.
I had to admit I had really got out of my depth on this mission. OK, it wasn't really a mission as such; someone else sends you on a mission. This was my own idea, my own fault. The cachet and the sheer riches it would mean to capture - or better still, kill from a safe distance - the universe's last Vampire, well, they'd gone to my head.
It was the most exciting thing I'd done since you and Rose left me on Satellite Five, Doctor.
I don't know how he disabled my ship. Superior technology, I guess, stolen from Bellatrix Four. There wasn't a living thing left on that world, not the millions of sentient beings who'd lived there, not an animal, not a plant, not even a germ. He'd squeezed that world until the pips squeaked and then he'd run, knowing he'd given himself away. Maybe he was tired of hiding.
His ship was full of robot spider-things the size of a man, covered in jointed tentacles. I was in my emergency spacesuit when they boarded, thank God, because they just tore open the canopy and pulled me out.
According to the chronometer sewn into the sleeve, it was three days later when I came round on the bridge of the Argus.
Lyt was six foot two with ice blonde hair to the middle of his back. He looked humanish, even human. I had expected maybe a Bela Lugosi cape, or at least something elaborate and Ming the Merciless, but he just wore an ordinary spacefarer's one-piece, like the one I had on under my pressure suit.
I guess if he had red eyes and fangs sticking out he wouldn't have been able to hide so long - for millions of years, millions. You could feel the weight of age coming off him.
'Where is he?'
'Where's who?'
He stepped in beside me and slid his palm down inside my shirt, as low as my navel. He laid his hand flat against my stomach. I was in three layers of spaceworthy clothing and I have never felt so naked in my life.
'I'll scar you, beautiful. I'll have those baby blues out and I'll have your tongue before I tear loose your viscera.'
'In need of some guts, are you?'
He took his hand away and faced me and whispered, 'Have you ever seen a man burned alive?'
'Can't say that I have.'
'Neither have I. Where is he?'
I spat in his face. I was out of clever lines.
'Let's find out.'
One of the science machines held onto me while the other one took a metal probe, like a flattened spoon, from Lyt's fingers. It floated up to me and started running the tip of the thing over my face. Across my forehead, pausing over my temples. It pushed it softly at one of my eyes, through the lid, then withdrew.
I laughed, I actually laughed, when it slid the thing into one of my nostrils. Then I realised it was looking for a place where the bone of my skull was thin enough.
'Switch on.'
Their probe had no effect on me at all. It hit the rest of the universe with unbelievable power. There had never been any stars, I remember that - they were all a huge conspiracy, huge lights trailed behind invisible spacecraft. Lyt's ship was trailing one of them, right now, and he had taken out my lungs and and replaced them with the battery needed to power the starlight. I remember I was absolutely terrified that he would put my lungs out of the airlock.
The thing was still in my nose when I found out I was lying on the floor. Every part of me was shaking like a flimsy house in an earthquake. I was roaring and shrieking like an opera singer being electrocuted. I was hyperventilating, the room was spinning, I couldn't draw breath.
Somehow, from somewhere, you were there. I knew it was you, I knew. I tried to crawl across the floor to you. Blood was gushing out of my nose. I remember trying to reach out, wanting to put my hand on your shoe, or grab the cuff of your trousers. I couldn't even do that.
I think I'd gone deaf. I couldn't understand what either of you were saying. I started to understand it was some sort of negotiation, some kind of contract, with me as the goods.
I think that was when I really lost it, started thrashing around on the floor. It was like trying to swim in a nightmare. One of the science machines sat down on me. Its tentacles curled round me like the bars of a cage.
I could still see. I think that was when I started to cry.
I saw one of the machines lash its silver limbs around you. Oh you were quick, twisting in their grip, slipping out of your coat, but you didn't really want to get away and in the end you let the thing pin you in place, holding you up.
Lyt loosened your tie, trying to do it slowly to make it worse for you, too hungry to wait. I saw the buttons pop off your shirt as he ripped into your neck. I couldn't see your face. I couldn't see his face. I could see blood running down behind his pale hair.
I saw you grabbing at his arms, trying to tear his hair, trying to kick him, twist away from him, pull free leaving your flesh in his teeth, anything to make it stop. The machine only tightened its grip.
I saw him laughing - I heard him laughing, as though my senses had come back all at once. I saw him throw his head back and yellow hair flowing down his back, flecked with blood.
I tried to look at the button that had rolled onto the floor in front of me instead.
I heard you scream.
It stopped.
I saw he was pushing his mouth into yours. I think there's something in their saliva. I saw you loosen in the machine grip, defeated by that bloody kiss. I saw your head lolling down, your tranquillised eyes.
I think I went deaf again, or blind. The next thing I knew I was here on this metal floor, staring into your face.
So the plan must have worked.
Hooray for our side.
THREE
Rose has decided it's about penetration.
The Doctor has told her as little about what happened as she would let him get away with. Actually, she didn't really want all the gruesome details. Just enough that she could understand, enough that she could really help.
Lyt, the Vampire - now killed very, very, guaranteed dead by the [something] Fleet - tortured Jack. Specifically he used some kind of probe, the Doctor says a neurological radar, whatever that means, to try and find out where the Doctor was. He didn't know the Doctor was already on his way to rescue Jack.
Lyt had forced his way into Jack's body - into his skull - and into his mind. It had hurt terribly. The Doctor said it would drive the strongest human being out of their mind, even if only temporarily. He had been penetrated, thought Rose, like a woman. Lyt had unmanned him.
That's why Captain Jack won't talk to her. She sat by his hospital bed for hours, but he wouldn't say a word. It's too humiliating. He needs to talk to another man.
She's not sure the Doctor actually qualifies.
She sits in a Fleet cabin, looking at herself in the mirror, pushing her hair around, sometimes flipping through a magazine she can't read. There is nothing she can do. This is their big reunion, and Jack is shattered and silent in a hospital bed, and the only thing she can do is stay away.
The door pings and opens. It's the Doctor. He looks pale and there's still something furious and cold in his eyes that makes her flinch. Then he smiles, as though putting all of that aside for her.
Rose can't help jumping up and throwing her arms around him, although she has to do it carefully to avoid hurting him. There are still dressings on his throat and the top of his chest. It makes her think Lyt was trying to eat the Doctor's hearts out.
'They're going to let me see Jack shortly,' he tells her.
Rose feels herself relax. The Doctor will know what to do, of course he will. He doesn't need to know all about male psychology, he doesn't need talk about penetration. He almost died himself from Lyt's bites and the poison in his mouth. He's been a prisoner, he's been hurt, he's been tortured so many times himself.
For a moment, she's so grateful she can't help. That makes her stomach tighten up so much that she thinks she might be sick.
'You'd better go, then,' she says, pulling out of the embrace and squeezing his hand. 'Make him better, Doctor.'
'I'll try.'
'Really try. Whatever it takes.'
'I'll do my best.'
FOUR
Penetration has nothing to do with it. What Rose knows about men is thirty centuries out of date.
The Doctor sits by Jack's bedside, thumbing through a Venatic magazine, patiently waiting.
At a glance, you can't tell there's anything wrong with the Captain. Lyt and his machines did very little damage on the outside. Even on the inside, he's looking good; the scans show his neurotransmitters are back to normal levels, there's no permanent neurological damage.
When he walked into the room the Doctor took in Jack's crumpled hair, his five o'clock shadow and his angry eyes that won't look at anything, still burning with shame.
'It was the helplessness,' says Jack, at length.
'Yes,' says the Doctor, not looking up from his magazine.
Ten minutes later Jack adds, 'Nice face.'
'Thank you.'
'Little asymmetrical, maybe.'
'All part of the charm.'
Jack sighs and runs both hands through his hair, pushing it into place. 'What does a fellow have to do to get a drink around here?' he says.